That was the big question I kept asking as I watched the latest episode of this gritty alien-invasion war drama. Plus, why doesn't Tom Mason put together a soccer team to escape from the prison camp? That would have been way cooler. Spoilers ahead...

Nothing in Falling Skies makes any sense any more, unless you assume that the Espheni are propaganda geniuses who are brilliant at convincing humans to go along with their plans. Let's look super-briefly at the three plot lines in last night's episode:

1) The Espheni apparently believe that Tom is on their side now, and are completely blindsided when he pulls a flamethrower on them and lights their Overlord on fire, then lures almost every Skitter into a condemned building while Pope and Botha destroy the fence. This is all cute enough, except I don't know why the Espheni ever thought Tom would go along with their plan to "Skitterize" all the other adults. Even if they promised to spare his family. It's either terminally incompetent on the Espheni's part, or we're supposed to think it's actually a tempting offer that Tom could reasonably have considered accepting.

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2) It's getting serious at brownshirt school, and Matt's girlfriend thinks she's going to break. As in, she'll start actually believing the crap they spout at that school, even though it's patently false and when they bring back an "alumna" who's helped to capture her rebel parents, the girl's mom starts yelling that they've been betrayed and the aliens are evil. In other words, the school's big propaganda push is a total bust — and most of the school's lessons seem to consist of repeating rote phrases and lining up, and eating gruel. After years of the Espheni murdering humans and reducing our civilization to ashes, this is supposed to turn those kids into obedient zombies how, exactly?

And meanwhile, Cochise locates "Mad Dog" Matt Mason and prepares to bust him out, as per his promise to Tom.

3) Everybody finds out that Lexi the creepy half-alien girl was meeting with an Espheni, and nobody seems to think it's a big deal except maybe Maggie. Lourdes (who was mind-controlled by the Espheni and forced to kill the President of the United States) and the rest of the former rebels just sort of shrug it off after Lexi explains that she's meeting with the Espheni because she's half alien and thus they're her people too. And violence is not the answer, people!

Oh, and Anne Glass finds Lexi because she has a dream — a really, really creepy dream about aliens experimenting on her when she was pregnant — and Anthony and the others are still just blindly following Anne after she passed out.

All three of these plotlines share a central flaw: the notion that anybody would ever trust these aliens, or take the idea of friendship with them seriously. Considering how resistant these people were to the idea of joining forces with the Rebel Skitters last year, it's kind of odd that we're supposed to believe anybody even entertains the idea of working with the Espheni.

Of course, the first of those three could just be the Espheni being really, really idiotic and kidding themselves that they made a great sales pitch to Tom Mason. But that doesn't explain the other two.

All in all, this show has gotten completely ludicrous and left all logic behind — but it's still kind of fun, in its own bizarre fashion. Noah Wyle is doing a lot with the material he's been given, including his big motorcycle chase and lecturing random people about history (it's like old times!). And Pope is getting to be a hero again. (During the debate over whether to let Pope wear the faraday suit, because Botha is injured and Dan Weaver has a weak heart, I wanted the camera to pan slowly over to Tector, who is sitting right there and is perfectly able-bodied.)

The whole thing has a very V: The Final Battle feeling to it, and not just because of the half-alien child. But that's okay — at least it's not channeling the V reboot, right?